Moore’s law has more lives than a very lucky cat
It’s 11 years since I last wrote a column about the end of Moore’s law (see issue 180!), in which time the number of transistors on a chip must have grown at least 100-fold. As I said in that column, just as in one four years prior, declaring the end of Moore’s law is a mug’s game. It’s a bit like predicting the Second Coming or the arrival of a Covid-19 vaccine.
As far back as a 1997, I’d predicted that lithographic limits and quantum effects would flatten the curve below 100nm feature size, and I was only off by one order of magnitude. That counts as a win in this futile race. Intel’s latest fabrication plant, built to produce chips with minimum 10nm feature size, was very late indeed and only started delivering chips in 2019, five years after the previous 14nm generation of chips.
